In today’s modern business world, a lot of people now invest money and time in content marketing. Unfortunately, it is never profitable for everyone. Especially in business blogging, without proactive link building strategy it all seems like gambling.

Optimism aside, you may be gambling away your time and money when your content marketing ROI is 100% guesswork. Even though measurability in this regard is very important, it is not the focus in this post.

At this point, the realization that great content is not enough might have hit your head vividly. Probably now in your own experience, the content marketing performance numbers unfold lots of questions that keep you wondering.

Is this really worth it?

Probably, you are not aware that over 2 million blog posts are published daily. That’s according to the stats from MarketingProfs. In your own niche, the story is likely to be different. But what have all these things got to do with link building and ROI?

In simple terms, this is an active process of building hyperlinks that leads both search engines and human web users from other websites to your own. Practically, placing these links happen in different ways. First is by taking action to build them on other people’s website. Example include links from business directories. Second is giving website owners incentive to place these links.

Third is to influence other people to place links without incentives. This one is normally referred to as natural or outreach link building in SEO.

The key point is that if you are not proactively building links in this regard, you’ll continue to miss out on the real benefits of backlink building. Whether you are business owner, marketer or blogger, the fact holds true for everybody.

To get the best results and for maintaining results driven consistency, you may decide to engage outreach link building experts from Search Beast - Search Marketing Company that considerable experience in this area.

Content Marketing – The Business Blog Example

In the context of marketing, content could mean many things. Think about images, videos, ebooks, white papers, social media posts, blog posts etc. As noted earlier, we’ll be focusing on blog posts for now. These days a growing number of business owners, startup founders and marketers invest resources in business blogging as part of their content marketing strategy.

Obviously, making those investments and sharing your posts on social media are all good. But it is extremely hard and in some cases impossible to get the exact marketing results you desire without proactive link building.

Question – how long would continue that way?

In a recent research report, Ahrefs revealed that around 94.3% of 2 million websites in their study generates zero traffic from organic search. On the very first impression this is not something a lot of people will worry about.

But what if these pages include blog posts you spent money and time to publish? To make you understand it clearly, generating no organic search traffic means near zero visibility in most cases.

The only exception is if you are spending money to promote your business blog. Now imagine that your entire business blog is a lone player standing in the middle of a football field! What prize or ROI define your experience at the end of the day? The interesting fast is that you are not alone. Measuring content marketing ROI is still a big challenge for millions of business people.

Now let’s look at the specific ways in which proactive link building affects the content marketing outcome that everyone cares about.

1. Direct Targeted Traffic Generation

First things first, all forms of website traffic are not equal. Hence there is always a form of target or untargeted low quality website visitors. For those that are building links at all, if you build them on websites that are not related to your niche, you end up attracting wrong visitors to your site. By doing this on sites that generate no traffic at all, the outcome you experience may even become worse.

On the other hand, proactive link building on niche relevant high traffic websites delivers high quality targeted traffic in addition to SEO improvements.

As a competitive growth strategy, it contributes to quality leads and revenue generation. Ignore link building and you’ll continue to miss out on this.

2. Long Term Search Engine Ranking

Here is the biggest benefit of search engine optimization strategy which includes strategic link building techniques like blogger outreach. When your blog posts are ranked in the first page of Google, it continues to generate quality traffic, leads and revenue for you over multiple months or even years in some cases. Note, there lots case studies to prove this.

With consistent inflow of quality leads from organic search ranking, business growth and ROI doesn’t have to depend on the size of your paid advertising budget.

3. Blog Traffic Conversion

The point here is that a percentage of your blog traffic can actually be converted into quality leads, clients or product buyers. But first you need to have effective conversion focused business blogging strategy. Supporting this with proactive SEO link acquisition will give you the competitive advantage you need. In essence you are setting the stage to attract real prospects exactly when they are searching for your products, services or related information.

However, your content marketing ROI will remain below average or flat zero if you do no link building at all. Sure you don’t want your blog posts buried and forgotten forever.

4. Organic Traffic Retargeting

In most niche markets it takes 2 to 10 touch points before getting a sale. And that is where retargeting comes in. You can use it to retarget, attract and convert a percentage of your blog traffic into real clients and customers.

The interesting fact here is that consistent link building will bring you more prospects with real purchase intent into your retargeting funnel. Moreover, these people don’t have to give you their email address before you can re-engage and sell to them.

Link building is one activity that often unfolds multiplier effect. If you don’t invest in it, the benefits will continue to elude you. Should you continue to spend money on your business blog, don’t end the ROI questions with guesswork. Great content alone is not enough. Hire an SEO agency if you can or learn to do the work yourself.